


And Enoch Still Walks With God.

by Lanna Michaels (lannamichaels)



Category: Highlander: The Series
Genre: Author's Favorite, Bereshis 5:24, Gen, POV Second Person, Podfic Available, Tanach References
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-27
Updated: 2010-08-27
Packaged: 2017-10-11 06:39:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/109539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lannamichaels/pseuds/Lanna%20Michaels
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You do not know how old you are and do not care.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And Enoch Still Walks With God.

**Author's Note:**

> tinypinkmouse made a podfic of this [available here](http://amplificathon.livejournal.com/962164.html) and [here](http://audiofic.jinjurly.com/and-enoch-still-walks-with-god). :D

You stopped counting a long time ago.

The Watchers call you five thousand years old and you don't bother to dispute that, or point out that they've been calling you five thousand years old for roughly two and a half millennia.

You don't point it out. It's not your job to correct their mistakes. Sometimes you think it's your job to ensure them.

And why not? The one who writes the history is the one who is correct. Your years, however many they happen to be, have taught you that.

And you stopped trying to count a very long time ago.

This isn't your era anymore; you can't remember when it ever was. You wander through, you touch, you taste, you improve the mixture, sometimes you stick around to see the final product come out of the furnace of years, and then you move on. There is always another war's inferno, there is always another soft, deadly landing.

There is always time in front of you. There is increasingly time behind you.

As you grow older, you grow younger. You can't remember a time when you were a callow youth, but if you relax, if you smile, if you cut your hair and sit up straight, that bartender will card you, keeping an eye out for the police.

It's strange, to be so old and seen so young. You accept it, you use it, but you never stop finding it strange. Your own kind might look at you and sense your power and know you to not be a child, but the mortals do not see.

You will outlive this language, you suppose. If you don't get killed first. A long life is no guarantee of tomorrow, you know, and neither is a short one. You have seen too many children die by the sword. Some of them, you killed yourself. Some of them killed you first.

You know the horror of death. You know it intimately. You have wrapped yourself in its embrace and lost all consciousness, knowing only safety in darkness. In light, you are seen. In light, you are judged. At night, you are safe beneath stars and storm clouds. You cannot be touched.

You know the horror of death. You have been it.

In this new century, you amuse yourself by wondering how long it will be before your inevitable Quickening-drained corpse will be considered a youth death, when it will be considered a tragedy of lost potential.

In this century, they are greatly worried about potential. You have seen potential destruction and potential creation; it is still true that there is nothing new under the sun. Yet some think they invent the world with every dawn.

You have been a father many times, in truth if not in biology, but if you have any living descendants left, you don't know of it. But you have never sired children; you cannot call yourself bereaved, not when you have been that knife in the dark as often as you have been. You have killed too many to claim the title of mourner for yourself.

You have been a murderer longer than your own memory will tell you. You are older than your own history, but your body shows it only in ancient scars that modern medicine would shy away from, horrified at the barbarity.

You do not remember your past; you suppose you have repeated it several times by now. Life has its limitations, you feel like a recording stuck on repeat.

It doesn't matter what century this is.

You blink, at times, and you see youth grown old, you see potential grown decrepit, you see waste and wastrels and death.

Death is your constant companion and you are its dog. This is a comfort. Few things are.

You are Methos, you are Adam Pierson, Benjamin Adams, a thousand others. You have had a thousand thousand names, a thousand thousand lives. And in this century, you are young. It amuses you, sometimes. You consider your life from that view, you break your memories into mortal terms. The time you cannot remember is your birth. Your wandering years, your learning years, were your childhood. Your time with the horsemen was your angry adolescence, and oh, how you screamed at the world, how you raged at the heavens, how you tore the world apart and built it into a place where you could stand to live, and then fled from the wreckage you created to find new ground to sow your future.

By this reckoning, you have been a modern-day graduate student for at least a thousand years. This amuses Joe, when you mention it to him. He reminds you that you never finished your thesis at the University, back when you were a student, back when Don was alive.

Back when Don, that_ child_, was still alive.

The perception of age is years, not attitude, but, oh, was Don ever a child, constantly searching for a myth, constantly believing, holding true. He died in Methos's service, and he probably knew it. Don, that child, that ever-believing child, might have known and never said a word. Might have suspected and wanted desperately to believe. Might have made himself believe.

Dying, he wrote a warning in his own blood. You have had brothers, you have had trusted friends, who would never have done as much. You have had loyal followers who would have turned and fled, or accepted their fates and died.

Don, that stupid, idealistic _child_, tried to warn you.

He succeeded. His death was horrible, but served its purpose. You and others of your kind have used pawns this way before, you have killed messengers, you have sent their corpses back as responses. You saw Don's corpse, you went to his funeral, and you did not let it enrage you. It was not the century for that kind of revenge.

You could have done better with his wife, but you were off your game, you were spinning hard, trying to remember what century it actually was.

It doesn't matter what century it is. The past is, inexorably, behind you. You are an elder without being old and you don't understand this modern outrage about child soldiers; as far as you're concerned, they're all children. They've always been all children. And they may be children, but that does not make you their protector. There are too many broken swords littering your past; you've lived too long in this endless war.

You can't moralize about age, you can't justify anything, you can't understand why anyone would ever bother. Death is always the same. It is not always simple, it is not always clean, but it is always the same. You have killed your share enough to know, certainly.

And sometimes it rankles, certainly. Sometimes you wonder at the waste, sometimes you get angry and you stay that way. Galati, certainly. You risked your life to save a friend, and then were forced to watch as pieces fell further into place than it pleased you.

This does not please you.

When it ends, you imagine a life burnt up as an offering to the gods of cease-fires and amnesty programs and duress-sworn oaths, and the life you imagine is Joe's.

Joe has never told you how he came to be in Vietnam, never told you how forced was his life in service, and you usually never need to ask, it's written on the face and in the lines of the hands for anyone to see. But Joe loved it and loathed it and nearly died in its service. You do not know if he considered the loss of his legs to be the price of his survival, a guilt-offering of his own body to be permitted to live. If Joe owed any debt to the ghosts of the dead, it has been repaid, with interest.

But you have seen survivors before, pulled away from the wreckage but always knowing how close it was. Joe, you imagine, has now discovered what it means to twice-survive a death sentence.

Joe, you imagine, would find no comfort in darkness. No, none at all. He is accustomed to survival, but he does not expect it. Perhaps he is wise.

You cannot remember all that you have survived. You cannot remember all who you have outlived. That's for the best.

Mortals talk about strategy and tactics, but those are for the barracks. In the field, in your years, you know that reaction is all. Reaction is all and it cannot be taught, it can only be learned and relearned and you do not know how old you are, but you know you have not learned it yet sufficiently to learn how to relax. You will relax when you know how to react before the hammer falls, and you do not know that yet. You may never know it. You do not take knowledge as granted automatically by age; the sun and earth will continue to turn whether you acknowledge a year or not. The world will go on without you.

You have, in idle times, amused yourself by contemplating world domination, and have always dismissed it; you have no interest in trying, and, if successful, in ruling. Perhaps for your sins, this is why Kronos, inevitably, inexorably, returns at the exact moment when you are, once again, bored, and once again, contemplating that _if_ you were to do it, how you would.

Perhaps it says something about your sense of scope and scale. Other men have hobbies, you have delusions. Familiar, friendly delusions, and you appreciate the mental patterns, all very familiar after all these years.

Kronos is not something new. He never really was. You knew his scope from the beginning and you knew him to be a kindred spirit. And, perhaps, for your sins, that is why he returns to you, all steely-eyed and murderous. Perhaps your boredom has grown wings, perhaps you now must see yourself in the mirror and then smash the glass and destroy your brother.

Perhaps that is the price of age.

Of course, you don't. You get a child to do it instead. As you have killed for MacLeod, he returns the favor and kills for you. In another age, that might have made you brothers, sworn in blood and death.

This is not that age. Thankfully, for your sins, this is not that age.

There are times, you consider, when you probably should start being more concerned with staying alive and less concerned with not dying. The distinction isn't subtle.

You aren't sure what century this is, but you do know that Kronos is dead and you are not. You cannot bring yourself to call yourself alive, not yet, not here, not now, perhaps not ever, and certainly not this century, whatever century it happens to be. You don't know how old you are and you don't care, but it feels so very long.

But you are not ready to die yet. Byron dies as he lived, as an utter waste of your hopes and dreams for him and if you have any living students left, you don't know of it. They are as dead as your children, as faded as the past you cannot remember and don't care to try.

Currently you are thinking about shipwrecks. You have been in enough of them, you have kicked and fought your way to the freedom of the surface of the water, you have untangled your legs from dead ships and detritus and rope and bodies. There is a special horror in a death at sea, the long swim to shore, the terror that you have finally found an obstacle so large you cannot traverse it. You hate the sea with a terror that proves your age, you suppose. You cannot imagine these children understanding and you feel so old.

It feels so very long. And there is always time in front of you.

The years are a shadow, stretching out behind into the darkness where you have always been safe. They cannot kill what they do not admit is real. Methos is elusive and a fragmented story, and you live to fragment it more. They can't kill you if they don't know what you are.

And Kronos cannot kill anyone any more. You have been destruction and creation and you have seen the millennia change like the seasons. The years are long: maybe in a few thousand, you can think Kronos a child as well. But not now.

That's for the best, you decide. This is the century where your past came to die. There are eons behind you and eons in front of you.

Your past disappears behind you, swallowed into the darkness. And when you turn around to look for it, it is no longer there.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [And Enoch Still Walks With God [Podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/313635) by [tinypinkmouse_podfic (tinypinkmouse)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tinypinkmouse/pseuds/tinypinkmouse_podfic)




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